Category Archives: Motor Neurone

The ‘is life futile?’ debate will continue to rage on until the end of time, but no one will argue that life is random. Suicide bombers, pile-ups, fertility, gardening accidents, bingo, sudden death, disease… we can’t even predict the weather, who could have predicted my friend Gavin would’ve died of a brain tumour 10 years back, or that Giles, who died on wednesday, would’ve got Motor Neurone disease.

I didn’t know Giles very well, but a few readers of Piqued were very close to him, best friends, they lived with him as students and remained close to him until fairly recently when he refused to take visitors.

Giles was tall and very handsome, beautiful, actually (from my point of view he was the bloke you kept your girlfriend away from). The last time I saw him, maybe 4 years ago, he was already showing the first signs of Motor Neurone disease, indeed, that was the last time I saw him. I witnessed his demise from the testimony of his friends. What followed is almost too horrible to contemplate. Of all the illnesses for a person to contract, it seems ironic, almost a cruel joke, that he had the one that attacks the physical body, stripping it of its movement by twisting itself into the very fibres of form and draining it of it’s electricity to leave a weightless emaciated shell.

Giles didn’t want anyone to see him like that. For that reason I hope we/they won’t remember him like too. We can take comfort that he wouldn’t have suffered in his final hours, modern drugs, they’re so pedantic, that he would’ve resigned himself to his fate a long time before he stopped seeing his friends, that he was at peace with himself before the Morphine made him forget about all the worry of pain, of life and of death.

In the pub with Frank last night, one of his closest friends who’d had a pretty rotten day by anyone’s standards, I asked what Giles had been doing before he became ill. ‘He was a TV Graphic designer, ‘ said Frank staring into his third pint, ‘you know that fish thing that the BBC use for their ‘Bitesize’ programmes for schools? That’s him, that’s Giles’.

The weekend is shaping up nicely, seeing an old friend in town this evening and tomorrow the family are colliding at lunchtime in deepest darkest Surrey to celebrate my brother’s birthday with a view to maintaining the inertia until the evening. Sunday I may have to go fucking shopping, it’s possible that last weeks double trip was enough to avoid this Sunday shafting episode, we’ll see.

Piqued may well be late on Monday but it’ll be up. I say that with such conviction after writing today’s post, with good luck and fortune, it’ll be up.

The Friday list… Christ help us, I’m sure it’s getting worse. Following it is a wee ditty and after that is my wish that you all have jolly good weekends. All of you.